


Lag

by hellkitty



Category: Aliens (1986)
Genre: F/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-22
Updated: 2015-12-22
Packaged: 2018-05-08 11:22:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,660
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5495339
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hellkitty/pseuds/hellkitty
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's not a date. Not really.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lag

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Yeomanrand](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Yeomanrand/gifts).



Ripley could feel her pulse in her throat as she moved across the narrow, spare room of the spaceport hostel.  Only the one knock--was that good, was that bad? Had they found her? Would Weyland-Yutani decide for the gentlemanly approach again, like they had with Burke--all slicked hair and slicker words?  

She tapped the vid screen by the door, and felt air rush from her lungs. Ripley tabbed the door open. “Corporal Hicks.” 

“For now.” He gave a gesture with one shoulder. “Can I come in?” 

It took a second for her to step out of the way--some still-awakened instinct of protection, though there was nothing to protect. Just her and an empty room.  Maybe she wanted to protect emptiness, maybe that was all she had left. 

“Sure.”  She stepped aside. “How’d the hearing go?” 

“Better than yours, probably. Let me keep my rank and pay.”

“Haven’t had mine yet.” Of course, that was her fault. She wasn’t keen on walking into that trap again, like she had the last time she’d been pulled out of cryo.  She kept telling herself when she could tell the story without getting the shakes she’d contact the branch office herself, but that was only a partial truth. 

Hicks scrubbed a hand through his hair. “I’d say it’s better to get it over with, but….”  

“But.” No words to finish that sentence.  He believed her, about Burke, about his plan to impregnate Ripley and Newt and smuggle them, as temporary-living-carriers to those...abominations.  When you signed on to the Company, you knew there was a chance you could die. She had always thought of, well, more commonplace deaths, accidental deaths: decompression, malfunctioning cryo, failure of O2 generators….  

“Any news on Newt?” 

A sudden pang, like a string plucked over her heart. “Gone.  Some relatives Earthside.”  She had to do that, at least.  Whatever the future held for Ripley, it wasn’t going to be one where she could have a child by her side. 

“Oh.” What else could he say, after all?

“It was for the best.” 

Hicks’s mouth pulled down, knowing she was lying, and not wanting to call her on it.  She must, she thought, radiate fragility.  His eyes scanned the room--the habitual tidiness of a deep spacer evident everywhere except the tangle of bedsheets, and the blue film of sleep tabs by the bed.  “Hey, Ripley. I didn’t come here to bring you down.” 

She was down enough already. “I know.”  

“I was just, you know. Kind of at loose ends.  Thought we could do something together.” The eyes locked to her, not even darting toward the bed.  

“Something.” 

“Dinner. Drinks. I don’t know.” A nervous smile. “Fuck, sounds a lot like a date, doesn’t it?”

Something in her melted, fast, at that smile and she felt one lightly touch her own lips. “I could use a date.”    
“Yeah?” The way a hopeful light kindled behind his eyes was...distracting, and she needed the distraction. 

“Yeah.” She looked down at herself, wrinkled coveralls, the thin socks spacers wore.  “I should dress for the occasion.” He had already, she realized, taking in the blue sweater he was wearing. Civvies. She’d never imagined him in them. It made him look strange: normal and strange at the same time.  

“You sure?”

She pushed him to the door. “Five minutes. I promise.” There wasn’t much to work with, in the first place, she thought. A few cosmetics probably still buried in her kit bag from the Nostromo, if she was lucky. A comb through the hair. Clean clothes, at least.  

“My kind of woman.” His grin turned a little cheezy, trying to hide flirting too hard behind pretending to flirt too hard.  It worked, at least for her.

 

Four minutes and fifty-five seconds. She checked her chrono, with a pleased grin. It had been harder than she’d thought. Or, really, she’d overthought things: put on some of the blusher in her bag, but staring in the mirror, she hadn’t recognized the flushed-looking cheeks that stared back at her. She didn’t even know what women wore these days, anyway, or if they even did makeup at all. So she’d scrubbed it off her cheeks and settled for a clean, unwrinkled set of coveralls and a wet comb through her hair, fluffing the curls where sleep might have mashed them against her head, and called it an honest effort. 

She opened the door. “Under time,” she announced...to an empty hallway. Ripley felt a mix of emotions over her--worry, ridiculous worry that the xenomorphs had found them, even here; anger, had she been stood up?; and another anger that she was far too old to get so heart-swung. 

“Five minutes,” Hicks announced, jogging around the corner. “Wow. You’re early.” 

“Woman of my word.” She felt the emotions melt around her, seep into the floor.  

“Got some, well, a complication.”

“Complication?”

“Next public shuttle isn’t for three hours.” His mouth worked, dismayed. “I mean, we could figure something out…?”

She grinned--probably awkward looking, unaccustomed. “Figured out.” She stepped out, closing the door behind her. “Let’s go.”

He fell into step beside her. “You gonna clue me in?” 

“Hicks. I do have a pilot’s license.”  And money: they’d paid her all her back pay for signing on for the mission to LV-426. Probably, she realized, never expected to have to pay out. 

“I know you work a mean loader,” he said, flashing a smile that fizzled at her face, as she remembered fighting the creature on the Sulaco’s dropship.  She pushed the memory aside: she’d have plenty of time to indulge in the past and its horrors in an uncertain future. Right now? Right now, she was going to link her arm with his, and say, “Wait till you see me fly.” 

 

It was an uneventful flight--blissfully so. Even so, Ripley couldn’t help but feel pleased how fast it all came back. In everything that had changed in the last fifty-seven years, flight protocols--the chatter between Control and pilot--hadn’t changed a bit. She felt a comfort in it, something, at last, familiar.  

And she felt Hicks’s eyes on her as she piloted the small craft--a dinky two seater, with a few frost bubbles on the hull and a drab navy and cream interior--down to the core. That felt good, too, as good as the clean clothes against her skin.  

It felt less good as they debouched from the shuttleport onto the thoroughfare--a ring that ran around the shopping and commerce level. It was strange to see solid flooring again, not the industrial grating, and the bright twinkling lights of shops, and the slight, almost imperceptible sideward pull of the station’s centrifugal rotation.  It was almost too much, the way the place just seemed to radiate security and safety: ‘nothing’s was wrong, so have some fun!’ it seemed to announce.  For a split second, Ripley saw the straight lines and clean angles of the place replace with the curved tubules, the slime-shiny resin and writhing lines of the nest. She shook her head, clearing her vision. 

“You all right?” Hicks’s hand brushed her arm.  

“Fine. Yes, fine,” she said, aware she was mumbling, sounding anything but fine.  “Getting there,”she added, more honestly. 

He gave a sympathetic nod. “It’s always weird. You know, coming back to the World, realizing you don’t have to be looking over your shoulder, spotting for snipers. Seeing stuff as it’s supposed to be.”

Supposed to be, rather than the chaos and mess of a life destroyed--Newt’s little nest, a jumble of damaged toys, scraps of a once-lived life. She nodded back. “I could use a drink.” 

“That sounds like a reasonably date-like think to do,” Hicks considered.  

They went to the first place they could find, less a bar than a cafe. Ripley surveyed the place, before deciding on a high-backed booth with a good view of the door.  “Make a Marine of you yet, Ripley,” Hicks said, settling down on the hard plastic seat, not across from her, but nearby, where they could both keep an eye on the entry.  “You got the shooting down pretty good already.”  

“I had a good instructor,” she said, and it felt….good, to talk like this, to flirt with the corners of her mouth, to feel that old flutter around her heart.  

And it felt good the way she could almost see the flush rising on his cheeks, the way his eyes ducked down, then up to hers again. “Well, let this instructor buy the first round, then.”

“I never turn down a gift from a handsome man.” It was her turn to lay it on a little too thick, for no other reason than the sheer joy of the grin they shared between them. 

“Well, until we find one of those, guess I’ll have to do.”  

It was one of those moments, bright and hazy and happy, that you knew was good, even as you felt it slipping away into time. She tried to hold onto it, at least for as long as possible, trying to remember every line of his face, the way the light limned his hair, caught in almost-sparkles on an errant bit of stubble on his chin.  

The drinks came, two glasses of sepia-shaded liquid. “At least booze looks the same,” Ripley lifted her glass, before realizing how much that sentence gave away.    
A beat, and then, “The cryo-lag, yeah.  Wake up, and you don’t know the movies that are out, or if the guy who sent you on your mission is still in office.”  

She knew he was talking months, weeks, instead of the decades she’d spent in cryo, but still, he understood. At least a little. She held up her glass. “For all the time we’ve lost,” she said, the smile barely flaring on her lips.  

“Nah,” Hicks said, raising his own. “To making up for lost time.” 

 


End file.
